Report: Our ISPs may be slow, but at least they’re honest

A new global survey suggests that while the US still lags on broadband speeds …

The cable industry is cheering new data suggesting that most Americans receive something close to the broadband speeds advertised by their Internet service providers. The Ookla broadband testing service's report compares "promised" versus "actual" broadband speeds around the world and concludes that Americans get 92.91 percent of their advertised throughput rate.

"That sounds like pretty good news," the National Cable and Telecommunications Association's Cable Tech Talk blog notes. "Networks are performing by and large as they should and, as a result, consumers are happy."

Go Moldova!

We'll get to the happiness question later, but for now, more data: The global advertised versus actual ratio is 87.01 percent, according to Ookla, with the United States coming in eleventh among nations.

Here (below) are the top ten performers. Kudos to the Republic of Moldova, whose residents apparently get more than their ISPs advertised Internet speeds. (Note that Eastern Europe in general pretty much clobbers the world in this survey.)

Republic of Moldova, 109.21%

Russia, 98.65%

Slovakia, 98.64%

Lithuania, 97.97%

Ukraine, 97.58%

Hungary, 96.80%

Switzerland, 96.72%

Bulgaria, 95.96%

Latvia, 94.83%

Norway, 93.97%

As for outstanding "as promised" states within the US, here are the top five:

Delaware, 100.85%

Massachusetts, 100.07%

Maryland, 99.56%

Rhode Island, 98.83 %

Virginia, 98.36 %

But keep in mind that this is not a ranking of top speeds, just the most honestly advertised ones. When it comes to actual broadband speeds, Ookla ranks the US pretty low. We come in at number 30 on the download speed index, with a "rolling mean" (average over the last 30 days) of 10.13 Mbps... just below Russia, Slovakia, and Lichtenstein.

South Korea tops the list at 35.70 Mbps, while Iran, Nepal, Zimbabwe, and Bolivia finish off the table at less than .6—a mere half megabit per second.

Not perfect

Still, no surprise that the cable industry likes Ookla's promised vs. actual speed findings. After all, they're a lot kinder to American ISPs than the Federal Communications Commission's latest data. In August, the FCC concluded that our actual broadband rates are typically about half of the "up to" speeds we see advertised.

Ditto, reported the United Kingdom's regulator around the same time. As of May 2010, the real UK speed had dropped to about 45 percent of the advertised rate.

Undaunted, the NCTA filed a detailed critique of the data from Comscore used by the FCC. The filing identified a slew of errors in Comscore's testing methodology, from protocol handling problems to mistakes in arithmetic.

comScore's various testing errors resulted "in an underreporting of the actual speed delivered by an ISP on its network, and the individual errors create a compounding effect when aggregated in an individual subscriber's speed measurement," NCTA charged.

In fact, the trade association isn't even 100 percent onboard with Ookla's methodology.

"Admittedly, the Ookla data is not a perfect measure of network performance either," Cable Tech Talk observes. "The Ookla data, like the comScore data, are based on user-generated speed tests and suffer from some of the same weaknesses. Both systems measure the long and winding road from a consumer's computer to a test server somewhere on the Internet. Although ISPs control only a portion of that road, speeds can be impeded anywhere along the route (e.g., within the home computer, the home network, or on the open Internet)."

But a recent MIT survey of various testing services ranked Ookla as "the best of the currently available data sources for assessing the speed of an ISP's broadband access service [italics in MIT report]." That, and the more favorable actual vs. advertising ratio, work for the NCTA.

The vast majority

As for Cable Tech Talk's comment that this new data "may help explain why a recent FCC survey found that over 90 percent of consumers are happy with the broadband speeds they're receiving"—funny about that. What that survey found (see our take on it here) was that most consumers don't even know their broadband throughput rate.

"When asked to specify their home Internet connection speed, described as 'the download or downstream speed of your connection per second,' the vast majority of home broadband users in the United States cannot identify it," the report concluded.

This, however, did not stop that same vast cohort from reporting that they were either "very satisfied" (50 percent) or "somewhat satisfied" (41 percent) with their connections. And even though they couldn't disclose the speed of that very or somewhat satisfying link, 71 percent assured the government that their connection is "as fast as the provider promises at least most of the time."

If we can trust Ookla's numbers, though, it looks like even wholly unwarranted belief can sometimes be accurate.

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.